Angela McRobbie - What Is a/the Girl Today?

This talk provides a survey of the feminist sociology of girlhood over a period of 50 years, with particular reference to the early work of the speaker (Angela McRobbie) and the defining vocabularies from the mid 1970s of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under the leadership of Stuart Hall . From passivity and invisibility the figure of the girl over the decades and particularly in the early 21stC comes to be a 'subject of attention' for whom 'female success' can be understood within the frame of a new 'sexual contract' that foregrounds education, meritocracy, wage-earning capacity and 'planned parenthood' all within the rubric of the constellation of gendered institutional powers that are directed towards young people. The lecture asks, how are these modes of social control interrupted and disrupted by diverse, queer feminist agency, how does social class and ethnicity create a new repertoire of resistance?

Angela McRobbie is Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London and Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent books are Feminism and the Politics of Resilience, Polity 2020, Fashion as Creative Economy (with Dan Strutt and Carolina Bandinelli ) Polity, 2020, Ulrike Ottinger : Film Art and the Ethnographic Imagination Intellect 2024 and Feminism Young Women and Cultural Studies: the Birmingham Essays from 1975 onwards, the Goldsmiths Press 2024.

Host or Publisher Strathclyde Feminist Research Network